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The IMesh Toolkit
[ Work In Hand > Technology Review > Products ]
MetaStar Product Suite
| Provider | Blue Angel technologies email: [sales][support]@BlueAngelTech.com Company home page: http://www.blueangeltech.com/ This is a commercial package. |
|---|---|
| Examples of Use | The Texas Records and Information Locator Service
(TRAIL) http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/trail/index.html |
| Purpose | A system for publishing and managing information on the internet or intranet. Data can be captured and managed; it can be made accessible for searching and retrieval; simultaneous searching of distributed sources possible. System can be used out of the box (no programming required after installation and configuration) or for creating your own customised applications. |
| Approach | The software comes as a bundle of four components, called Repository, Gateway, Server and Data Entry. The four components are collectively called Enterprise. Repository is the data management component that deals with the capture and transformation of data. The Data Entry component enables manual entry and updating of data. Gateway handles interactions with distributed data sources. Server makes stored data accessible for search and retrieval. Gateway and Server can be used independently; Repository and Data Entry components are integrated together and cannot be used separately from each other, but can be used independantly of Gateway or Server. In addition this provider also supplies two other related products called Harvester, Interchange and SDKs(described under extra features). |
| Platform and requirements | The Repository component only runs on Windows 95/98/NT. The other components run on NT and UNIX. |
| Components and their technology | |
| Server | The Server component comes integrated with a Search Engine,
and provides a variety of search facilities (e.g. full text,
numeric), depending on which search engine it is used with. The
search engine provides the indexing capabilities and it is the
index that is queried (rather than the database itself). The
server is accesible via the Z39.50 protocol. The Gateway component uses Z39.50 (CORBA?) at the back end to access the other distributed sources. It can accept a single query and merge results from distributed sources on any number of servers. |
| Database | The database is not provided in the package; relational databases compliant with ODBC can be managed via the repository component. The repository component exports XML to the database. Data entry, updating and deleting can also be managed via the Data Entry component. This component is accessed by users via their web browsers. It takes XML data, and interfaces to the database via JDBC. Existing databases can be linked to the system. The records need to be converted to XML - then this format is indexed and made available for searching. |
| Search tools/clients | The Server component is accessible via any Z39.50-compliant client. For Gateway, the query interface is web-based. |
| Metadata Management | The repository component supports metadata managment activities. It interfaces to relational databases via the ODBC standard. It enables configuration of the database to store XML data. It supports import and export of XML data, and other formats. |
| API | The suppliers also market a set of SDKs for the development of applications using Z39.50 and handling XML data. The SDKs are described briefly under extra features. They are supplied separately from the Enterprise suite. Available as C++ libraries (and sometimes Java). The components of the Enterprise suite are available as follows: The Data Entry component is written in Java; The Server is implemented in Java and C++ |
| Metadata Formats | |
| Metadata Management | The Repository component supports metadata management activities. It interfaces to relational databases via the ODBC standard. The repository exports data to the database as XML. It enables configuration of the database to store XML data. The repository can be used for importing and exporting data; import formats are XML and SGML; export formats include: XML, SGML, MARC, DIF, HTML, SUTRS. |
| Extras/Other features | Three products that can fit in with the Enterprise product are Harvester, Interchange and the SDKs. They provide additional functionality. |
| Harvester | Harvester is a software robot that crawls websites and gathers data elements like HTML tags, HTML META tags and XML elements. Using a text configuration file, the HArvester tanslates extracted information into either a structured or a custom format. |
| Interchange | This is an authoring tool that generates XML documents from Microsoft Excel. |
| SDKs | The translation SDK is for import and export of XML data. It is written in C++. The client side SDK is for enabling clients to send requests to multiple servers (Z39.50), and handle the responses received. It is available as a Windows DLL, as a Java library, or as C++ libraries. The server-side SDK is for developing applications providing the functionality of a Z39.50 server, which can concurrently handle clients. |
| ASF | Harvest | Index+ | Isaac |
| Metastar | ROADS | Sitesearch | Zope |